Chickafinty ~ A Life in the Laundry

Too many demons

From September 1978 through until January 1983 I lived in a small country town called Cowra.  With a population of 4800, the town boasted one lift (elevator) in the hospital, no traffic lights, no KFC, no Pizza Hut, just a couple of chippies and a couple of Chinese restaurants.  It is possibly the most parochial place on the face of the planet.  If your grandmother's grandmother had not been born in Cowra then you were virtually a non-person.

Historically it is famous for being the site of a Japanese POW camp in WW2, from which there was a mass breakout in 1944.  About 1000 prisoners staged an escape in order to be killed as to be taken prisoner for a Japanese was the ultimate in shame.  Better to die in battle than have to go home a former prisoner.  The remains of that camp can still be found there, along with a war cemetery where those killed in the breakout are buried.  With the war safely in the distant past, the relationship between Cowra and Japan is a warm one.  There are beautiful Japanese Gardens in Cowra as a lasting memorial to those who died...far from the whole affair being  a blot on the landscape, the town is enormously proud of its heritage.

But it is with trepidation that I return to Cowra. In Cowra I learned, painfully and far too young, that the world is not a safe place to be.  There are demons everywhere, at every turn.  Yes there is a degree of nostalgia, but there are also demons - even 22 years on and a life time ago, I cannot walk the streets here and feel safe.

And that is desperately sad.

Gone...

About four weeks ago I shared a book with my class called “Where Are You?” It’s from the Big Mob Books for Little Fullas series, designed to spark the interest of Aboriginal kids.  It carries the theme of endangered animals and provided a terrific springboard for all kinds of discussion.  The text was deceptively simple i.e. “Blue whale, blue whale where are you/Deep in the ocean, oh, we are few” and so on.

The last page featured a photograph rather than an illustration and was black and white rather than colour.  It contained the text “Tassie tiger where are you?  Gone.” The expressions on the faces of the children as I read the text created one of “those moments” when teacher and children share a deep emotional connection.  Some of the students actually got tears in their eyes as they realised, possibly for the first time, that animals can be lost from our planet.  It was an amazing moment.

I couldn’t help but think of that moment today when standing at the tiger exhibit at the zoo.  100 years ago,

Asia

was crawling with tigers.  Now there are only 5 out of 8 species left and every single one of those species is so threatened that they could become extinct in the wild within my lifetime.  How could this possibly have been allowed to happen?  How in the space of just a hundred years out of 6 – 10000 years of history can we have hunted such a magnificent animal to the brink of non-existence?  It defies understanding and I couldn’t explain it to the kids.  For some things there are insufficient words.